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krpalmerMy library’s ebook lending service is handy, but perhaps not that easy to browse into its back catalogue. “New releases” are much more noticeable in it, and one new release I noticed was a book named The Free World by Louis Menand, subtitle just readable in the cover thumbnail as “Art and Thought in the Cold War” (from the end of World War II to the Vietnam War). With some interest in decades I wasn’t alive for picked up both through other looks back and some things from that time, I went ahead and signed out the book when I had the chance.
Menand’s introduction did touch a bit on the perils of looking back with too much interest, reminding me that “broad prosperity” was still only available for some and roles were enforced for more than just those altogether excluded. The book did lead off with ideological struggle, then headed straight to how everyone had their own different theory on just where the risk from within was, with early chapters on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, both of which have risen back to fresh prominence in recent years. Having read both of those books, I suppose I was willing to note Menand pointing out potential blind spots in Orwell and Arendt’s systems of thought. The narrative got a bit less weighty moving to modern art (from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art), and then there was a chapter on rock ’n’ roll, surprising to find at first but as intriguingly insightful in the end as the rest of the book.
The book did get in turn to civil rights and womens’ liberation, in the second case exploring how possible roles for women had narrowed fast after World War II and then, in taking on the misogyny of the time, managing to touch on the controversy over comic books. There was another intriguing insight packed into “Exaggeration--studlier heroes, bloodier killings, pointier breasts--is in the DNA of the medium. It’s what comic-book art is good at.” (The book isn’t just about “American” thought, and I can see that comment applying in only somewhat different ways to comics from elsewhere.) After anticipating the book getting to movies, I took note of it focusing on Pauline Kael, and then found interest in descriptions of the particular editorial take of The New Yorker for its “culturally insecure” readers, with the comment “They did not need to be told who Proust and Freud and Stravinsky were, but they were glad, at the same time, not to be expected to know anything terribly specific about them.” I suppose I could imagine being pointed to myself and reminded there are books that summarize, but also original source material too.
Menand’s introduction did touch a bit on the perils of looking back with too much interest, reminding me that “broad prosperity” was still only available for some and roles were enforced for more than just those altogether excluded. The book did lead off with ideological struggle, then headed straight to how everyone had their own different theory on just where the risk from within was, with early chapters on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, both of which have risen back to fresh prominence in recent years. Having read both of those books, I suppose I was willing to note Menand pointing out potential blind spots in Orwell and Arendt’s systems of thought. The narrative got a bit less weighty moving to modern art (from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art), and then there was a chapter on rock ’n’ roll, surprising to find at first but as intriguingly insightful in the end as the rest of the book.
The book did get in turn to civil rights and womens’ liberation, in the second case exploring how possible roles for women had narrowed fast after World War II and then, in taking on the misogyny of the time, managing to touch on the controversy over comic books. There was another intriguing insight packed into “Exaggeration--studlier heroes, bloodier killings, pointier breasts--is in the DNA of the medium. It’s what comic-book art is good at.” (The book isn’t just about “American” thought, and I can see that comment applying in only somewhat different ways to comics from elsewhere.) After anticipating the book getting to movies, I took note of it focusing on Pauline Kael, and then found interest in descriptions of the particular editorial take of The New Yorker for its “culturally insecure” readers, with the comment “They did not need to be told who Proust and Freud and Stravinsky were, but they were glad, at the same time, not to be expected to know anything terribly specific about them.” I suppose I could imagine being pointed to myself and reminded there are books that summarize, but also original source material too.